Modeling Driver Preferences in a Bicycle Courier Service

Courier services have a long tradition in logistics, primarily in the delivery of valuable documents or medicines. In cities and on short-trips, bicycle couriers have major advantages as they are less affected by traffic volume and congestion, they do not block small streets while serving, and they can serve customers in car-free zones more easily.

This dissertation expands the field of research on fairness aspects in vehicle routing problems by focusing on the individual preferences of the drivers. To model the bicycle courier service in the most basic way, a pickup and delivery problem is defined. Different considerations about fairness and satisfaction from the drivers' perspective are then included into the problem. Based on this, various models are developed that partly and successively build on each other. The dissertation can be roughly divided into two parts. In the first step, the focus is on static models which means that all information is known in advance. In the second step, the problem setting will be shifted to the dynamic case where some information appears during the planning horizon. In addition to the problem formulations and models, suitable solution approaches will be presented and computational studies will be conducted.